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For more than 30 years, Dr. Joan Reede worked to increase the diversity of voices and viewpoints heard at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and at its affiliate teaching hospitals and institutes. Reede, HMS's inaugural dean for Diversity and Community Partnership, as well as a professor and physician, conceived and launched more than 20 programs to improve the recruitment, retention, and promotion of individuals from racial and ethnic groups historically underrepresented in medicine (UiMs). These efforts have substantially diversified physician faculty at HMS and built pipelines for UiM talent into academic medicine and biosciences. Reede helped embed the promotion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) not only into Harvard Medical School's mission and community values, but also into the DEI agenda in academic medicine nationally. To do so, she found allies and formed enduring coalitions based on shared ownership. She bootstrapped and hustled for resources when few readily existed. And she persuaded skeptics by building programs using data-driven approaches. She also overcame discriminatory behaviors and other obstacles synonymous with being Black and female in American society. Strong core values and sense of purpose were keys to her resilience, as well as to her leadership in the ongoing effort to give historically marginalized groups greater voice in medicine and science.

Mandalay Homes, a home builder based in northern Arizona, is a market leader in energy efficiency based construction. The company is now at a crossroads for developing a strategy for the future. Internal leadership is in agreement that quality is better than quantity and wants to focus on innovations to further push the market forward toward sustainability. The case introduces students to the residential construction industry, climate change as it relates to construction, energy efficiency standards and certification programs, renewable energy market principles, the green construction industry, and potential innovations within the residential construction space. The case outlines the proverbial wall that Mandalay is approaching in terms of the improvements that can be made to sustainable homebuilding withing the current paradigm. The company has identified three frontiers within which Mandalay Homes can allocate priorities: (1) resource management, (2) prescriptive vs. performance-driven building standards, and (3) newer options for building sustainable homes and communities.

In this Ivey Business Journal Q&A, Ivey Business School Professor Tima Bansal-one of the sustainability field's most cited scholars-explains why there is nothing anti-capitalist about sustainability, while making the case for old-school capitalists to embrace Ivey's ambitious Innovation North initiative, which aims to save the planet (and capitalism) by disrupting traditional approaches to innovation. She says sustainability suffers from two issues. First, some people think that sustainability is about asking them to do less. The second issue is that many people, including executives, just don't know what to do about sustainability and how to do it. Bansal claims we need to reframe the discussion as prosperity-an opportunity to realize better health and community. Instead of talking about sustainability as reforming capitalism, we need to think about sustainability as innovating for prosperity. Innovation North assembles senior business leaders, academics, and world-renowned systems thinkers every three months to discuss how to innovate the innovation process. It is working with partner companies to create a toolkit that bakes systems thinking into innovation-the Innovation North Compass. This uses both ideas (as in the stage-gate model) and solutions (as in design thinking). Ultimately, Bansal says, a systems thinker thinks differently than how we teach people to think in business schools. They work though problems differently, not looking for the right answer but instead looking for patterns and possibilities.

with a description of three concepts it inspired and an invitation to design a set of experiments to test the concepts' desirability, feasibility, and viability. The C case reviews the two phases of testing actually conducted. Taken together, the three cases cover a completed design thinking process in detail, with a particular goal of encouraging student reflection on the design of research plans, both exploratory and confirmatory. SWR operated some of the busiest train routes in the United Kingdom, with 235 million passenger journeys a year. It covered urban, suburban, regional, and long-distance routes between London's Waterloo Station and locations in southwestern England. SWR struggled with some long-term problems: challenging relations with a highly unionized work force, major network repairs needed, low staff morale, and overcrowded commuter services. All these were compounded by the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. Amid these challenges, senior leadership at SWR concluded that the pandemic presented a unique opportunity to change how the public and the UK Department for Transportation viewed SWR, and to improve the passenger experience. SWR reached out to David Kester & Associates (DK&A), a leading design-strategy consultancy, in search of a partnership that could help the rail company innovate. DK&A's mandate was clear: learn fast from customers, rapidly deliver confidence-building basics at stations, and work closely with SWR staff to reshape both the organization's culture and their passenger's experience. SWR wanted practical ideas to better meet customer needs-ones that could be trialed and scaled throughout the network. But how to go about gathering the data needed within a tight timeline amid the complexity of SWR's operations and opportunities? For those interested in adding self or peer assessment to students' design thinking learning journey, Professor Jeanne Liedtka, working with coauthors Karen Hold, Jessica Eldridge, and Treehouse

This case, a follow-up to "Design Thinking in Action (A): South Western Railway" (UVA-S-0377), finds South Western Railway (SWR) and its design-consultancy partner, DK&A, beginning work on a project to improve passenger experience. The team followed a classic design thinking methodology, the Double Diamond, focused on four steps-discover, define, develop, and deliver-and created an ambitious three-month schedule to meet a tight delivery deadline. The case describes in detail how team members gathered data from a variety of passenger categories, created persona types and journey maps, and identified new ideas to help SWR accomplish its goals. It concludes with questions about how these ideas should be tested. What design should experiments take? What outcomes were most important to measure and learn from?

This third case in the series that begins with "Design Thinking in Action (A): South Western Railway" (UVA-S-0377) describes two waves of experimentation undertaken by UK railway operator South Western Railway (SWR) and its design-consultancy partner, David Kester & Associates (DK&A), during the deliver stage of their joint project to improve customer experience at SWR. They had followed a classic design thinking methodology, discovering customer experiences and needs, defining journey maps and personas, and developing concepts. In this final case, they tested those concepts in actual rail stations to determine whether they met goals for desirability, feasibility, and viability. For those interested in adding self or peer assessment to students' design thinking learning journey, Professor Jeanne Liedtka, working with coauthors Karen Hold, Jessica Eldridge, and Treehouse Design, has synthesized more than a decade of research at Darden to create the Innovation Impact Assessment. This tool will help students identify personal development opportunities and provide them with practical guidance (in the form of detailed individual feedback reports) to accelerate skill development. The instrument identifies a set of five core competencies based on 44 behaviors that successful design thinkers have in common. It is available for individual use and bulk purchase via Darden Business Publishing at this link: https://store.darden.virginia.edu/innovation_impact_assessment.

This case traces the digital transformation exploration of NOVA VISION (also called "Baodao Glasses"), as the leading Chinese service-oriented eyewear retailer sought continuous improvement. The company developed informatization construction in its early stage. In the internet era, it started an online business and tried the O2O (online to offline) model in 2013. In 2019, it launched a methodology for private domain traffic operations and implemented drastic organizational changes. They followed its strategic positioning of "professionalism + digitalization" and operational goal for transforming the traditional "store operation-centered" sales model into "member operations as the core" service-oriented retail model. However, NOVA VISION's digital initiatives were not recognized by peers for many years, nor have they solved the industry's essential pain points, such as the high proportional personnel costs and the steadily rising store rents. NOVA VISION still faces internal and external challenges. The extremal challenges include threats from upstream players in the industry chain of lens and glass frame brand giants as well as competition from eye hospitals that enter the optician industry. Internal challenges come from its employees, who may be full of confusion and uncertainty about the future. It is crucial that NOVA VISION better implements the "professionalism + digitalization" strategy and ensures organizational changes bring effective outcomes. Wang Zhimin, chairman of the board of directors, still has a strong idea for exporting the company's own experience and upgrading the industry through platformization, which is full of unknowns. Will future generations still need glasses? What kind of glasses will they need? The future of eyewear service retail is blurry... NOVA VISION's related exploration reflects several important issues in the development of China's optical retail industry, such as "healthcare vs. fashion" needs, "online vs. offline" scenarios,

The founder of Jucai Human Resources Development Co., Ltd. had witnessed the development of China’s human resources service industry over the previous 20 years. In the company’s early stages, it had mainly relied on the advantage of information asymmetry of the Internet to carry out online recruitment services. But from 2015, the founder became interested in and confident about the prospects of providing a talent assessment service for public institutions and thus decided to start such a service. After five years of development, the company had become a leading enterprise in the domestic talent assessment service for public institutions. However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, talent assessment services for public institutions suddenly stagnated. The founder realized that this service was too dependent on government policy support, although income from this service accounted for 70 per cent of its revenue. If public institutions shifted their talent assessment business from outsourcing assessment to independent assessment, the company would face a severe challenge. Therefore, the founder had to consider how his company could reduce its dependence on policies and achieve sustainable development by using existing data resources.

The payments platform company Xendit came to life with a pivot. Its founders first built a product that would allow individuals to exchange funds--like Venmo but with more privacy--and then rolled out a simple business-to-consumer interface, similar to a pared-down version of Shopify. But they soon realized that such apps couldn't be successful without an infrastructure for digital transactions and banking. They'd already built an internal system to ensure quick and seamless incoming and outgoing payments, so they decided to offer it externally to speed transactions from bank to business and business to business, easing a significant pain point for enterprises of all sizes in the region. In the years since, they've maintained month-over-month revenue growth of more than 10% and expanded from a few dozen employees to more than 1,000 distributed around the world. And in its latest funding round Xendit achieved a valuation of more than $1 billion. Its leaders are taking the lessons learned in the company's earliest years--know your market, stay nimble, prioritize talent and culture--to overcome new challenges, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the war in Ukraine. Their ethos is to move fast but thoughtfully, working product by product and country by country, to build and strengthen Southeast Asia's digital economy.

Despite their reputation in the 1980s as corporate raiders, most private equity firms attempt to improve the performance of their portfolio companies through better corporate governance. But while the G in ESG (environmental, social, and governance) has always been important in the industry, the E and the S have been virtually nonexistent. Private equity has been comfortable seeking returns with little concern for the long-term sustainability of portfolio companies or their wider impact on society. That needs to change, the authors write, because PE has grown so large that society's most urgent challenges can't be addressed without the industry's active participation in the sustainability movement. Having interviewed a large sample of executives who run PE firms and the asset owners that fund them, the authors offer recommendations for how private equity can emerge as a leader in the ESG field--to benefit the wider world as well as its own long-term performance.

The founders of Protein Power Plates--a company with the slogan "Let's meat!"--contemplate adding plant-based burgers to their menu. This fictional case study by Lena G. Goldberg and Michael S. Kaufman features expert commentary by Lynn Blashford, Scott Uehlein.

The founders of Protein Power Plates--a company with the slogan "Let's meat!"--contemplate adding plant-based burgers to their menu. This fictional case study by Lena G. Goldberg and Michael S. Kaufman features expert commentary by Lynn Blashford, Scott Uehlein.

The founders of Protein Power Plates--a company with the slogan "Let's meat!"--contemplate adding plant-based burgers to their menu. This fictional case study by Lena G. Goldberg and Michael S. Kaufman features expert commentary by Lynn Blashford, Scott Uehlein.

MiracleFeet, a US-based non-profit, improves access to high-quality treatment of clubfoot in low-income countries, typically in partnership with public hospitals and local NGOs, by providing low-cost foot braces, training, advocacy, awareness-raising and financial and operational support. It aims to treat 100,000 children by 2024 across 70 countries - half of them middle-income countries. Having succeeded in low-income settings, it now plans to target middle-income countries, starting with the Philippines, convinced it can make an impact by taking a different strategic approach. However, the middle-income segment proves less straightforward than anticipated, even if healthcare infrastructure is more developed and families can cover some of the costs. The narrative follows the non-profit across a decade of development, culminating with the question: what can MiracleFeet do differently to ensure its service offering succeeds in the Philippines, and then rolled out to other middle-income countries?

In April 2019, Robyn Denholm, the chairperson of Tesla, Inc.'s board was asked by a judge to work with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to settle the contempt of court charges brought by the agency regarding Elon Musk's, the CEO, use of Twitter to make factually incorrect market-moving tweets about the company's prospects. The contempt charge was about a violation of protocol that was set up following an adverse 2018 verdict against the company on a similar charge. Denholm and Tesla's board had to act against the backdrop of several factors, including Musk's tremendous popularity among his 24 million Twitter followers, a soaring Tesla stock price, and an ongoing defamation lawsuit that stemmed from a Musk tweet after a daring rescue of a stranded Thailand soccer team by a British diver in 2018. In settling with the SEC, the board had to consider a variety of options, including the nuclear option of firing Musk that was suggested by a Tesla investor.

The case focuses on the ASEAN Basketball League (ABL), one of Asia's major regional professional basketball competitions. Launched in 2009, the league struggled to become financially viable in its first decade, and quickly encountered many challenges including multiple leadership changes, a high team turnover rate, weak fan engagement, and poor take up of its broadcasting rights. When COVID-19 derailed its 2019-2020 season, the ABL abruptly suspended all games and never resumed competition. There was even a launch of a rival league called the East Asian Super League (EASL) during the pandemic that had detrimental ramifications for the league's fan base. Further, as a regional league, international air travel COVID-19 restrictions and quarantine requirements made it impossible to have the existing ABL competition format resume. These moves had a major impact on the future sustainability of the ABL. As the case concludes, students are put in the shoes of the ABL founder, Fernandes, who must decide from three strategic options: to re-start the league now, keep the league suspended, or make the difficult move to discontinue the league.

It's time to address the disconnect between green job growth and the employment expectations of the green generation

The financial world needs to recognize that making a proactive difference requires more than simply appropriating impact assessment terminology

In January 2021, Jalila Mezni, cofounder and CEO of the SAH Group, was preparing to present the company's future growth plans to its board of directors. The Tunisian company was a leading producer and distributor of personal care and packaged hygiene products. In 2019, it expanded further by entering the detergents market. By 2020, the company employed over 4,500 people and had a presence in 20 African countries. The Lilas brand had become a household name in Tunisia, outperforming brands owned by global players like Procter and Gamble. In detergents, SAH was steadily gaining ground over multinational consumer goods companies like Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser, and Henkel. As Mezni looked ahead, she had to carefully evaluate three growth opportunities: introducing a range of kitchen cleaners, vertically integrating operations in the detergents business, and opening a subsidiary in Kenya. Which of these, if any, would be the right way forward for the SAH Group at this juncture?

People seldom know that the fashion and luxury industry has become an industry with high water pollution, raw material consumption, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Premium goods and sustainability seem contradictory, but Kering Group, one of the leading global luxury houses, has blazed the way for more than two decades. From the Chairman and CEO, and Sustainability Programme Director at headquarters to employees on each continent, sustainability was rooted in the mind of everyone at Kering. It evolved its strategies for environmental protection and social benefit issues by various means: the Group adjusted its organizational structure and set up a specific department with experts from different backgrounds. The Group also calibrated specific numbers to improve on operational efficiency and decrease pollution. More intriguingly, it diversified ways to achieve business objectives such as innovative initiatives like the "Kering Generation Award (K Gen)" and the measurement tool, "Environmental Profit & Loss (EP&L)". The K Gen in China aimed to gather critical players along the value chain within the luxury ecosystem while establishing an open platform to enhance awareness of corporate citizenship and environmental protection. EP&L measured Kering's ecological impacts, assessed raw materials used in production and designing, and directed the Group towards more sustainable sourcing solutions, innovative technologies, and new materials development. However, both innovative initiatives had their limitations. The cultural differences between East and West mean it is difficult to duplicate the western model in the eastern cultures. At the same time, any new management tool had to overcome organizational inertia and balance the interests of different stakeholders. Stakeholder management has thus become an inevitable issue. Internally, the Group had to balance corporate-level enforcement and brand-level autonomy. Externally, the Group had to engage with various